Six Apart Redesign

A couple people have asked about my thoughts on the Six Apart redesign — I think it’s fantastic, they did a really excellent job. A great example of a modern and attractive website using semantic HTML. It reminds me I should take a look at sIFR again.

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6 replies on “Six Apart Redesign”

I hate the image replacement, firstly my Firefox Adblocker extention throws up the little adblock tab above every heading, and each heading takes for-ever to load. Totally unlike the php method you employ…which is still too cool for school…

It’s not obvious why they’re using it for the headings on the front page. Are they changed dynamically enough that it wasn’t worth creating images in photoshop (as they do for other headers)?

Browser right click contextual menu is completely gone because of it, and even the Flash right click is gone because they use an underline on hover. I’m just not seeing the advantages.

Although sIFR has been developed to work with linked text, it is almost always not appropriate to do so. Even Mr Inman agrees, ” I wholly agree with Andrew’s recommendation to avoid using sIFR with links. Guns don’t kill people…”

Every image replacement technique has its edge cases where functionality is sacrificed. PHP image text isn’t selectable. sIFR text isn’t visible to FlashBlock users until they click or disable. Both methods sacrifice very little in my opinion, while beautifying the design quite a bit. But then again, I’m a designer, and I’m totally biased…

I’m a great fan of sIFR, as you know Mike, but I hope it hasn’t been used here in a way that is going to make people misunderstand its potential.

I don’t think they’re gaining much here. They could have used images, normal static images I mean, and right click would not be disabled, and not much more bandwidth would be needed.

Where sIFR is used best, it doesn’t effect the user experience: in fact it enhances it as text becomes selectable, and faster loading. However, on the Six Apart website the right click contextual menu is missing, as is status bar notification of the link destination. This will effect people’s experience in a negative way.